There are many available platforms for playing digital video on the web. MICROSOFT™ SILVERLIGHT™ and ADOBE™ FLASH™ are two web-based runtime platforms that provide the ability to package and run applications within a web browser that include digital video. Web browsers may provide access to hardware resources for efficiently playing back video and sound to select browser components, such as a trusted runtime. These components can play video with efficiency close to that of digital video playing natively on a desktop computer system.
The Internet and internal corporate networks contain a large amount of digital video content. Video sites such as YouTube, instructional videos provided by training companies, websites that contain helpful information, and many other sources include millions of videos that can be accessed and viewed by people using a web browser. A few languages predominate much web content, and individual countries often have a large body of digital video in each country's native language. Digital video is often not translated such that an audio track is provided for every language, as translation and voice overs are expensive and time consuming. Thus, many digital video files can only be understood by speakers of a particular language.
Digital videos often contain captions that display written text of the words being spoken in the digital videos. Captions are helpful for users that are hearing impaired or for watching videos in circumstances where audible noise is not possible or impolite. Most videos include captions only in the same language as the spoken audio track. Some videos may include captions in two major languages, but rarely more. Translating captions has also traditionally been time consuming and expensive, thus content producers typically target a primary audience and provide captions in that language. This makes a wealth of digital videos unavailable to speakers of other languages.